Considering how close-run the Battle of Sentinum was IOTL, it's not hard to imagine a scenario where the Samnites and their allies scored a victory. One easy POD might be the Romans never discovering the Samnite plans, which means the Etruscans and Umbrians stay.

Which leads to a fairly obvious question: what if the Samnites won the battle?
 
I think the allies would seek most a dismantlement of the alliance system created by Rome outside of Latium, especially the recently acquired Adriatic coast, so a general reversal of the gains made since the start of the second samnite war would happen.

The real question is what happens to Rome internally, a popular trope is that they would just reform and fight to exhaustion in every engagement they find themselves but if their allies get disillusioned and start breaking off then there is little determination can do, especially considering the size of the coalitions. I heard a couple of times the alliance and types of treaties the Roman used made them very resilient and efficient at warfare but it seems to me that if they fail military there is much room for many of those recent expansions to simply break off on their own accord(heck the Latin war was just 2 generations away from this battle).
 
Top